myself, 'Here's the proof that he was in Miss
Rachel's sitting-room between twelve last night,
and three this morning!'

"I shall not tell you in plain words what
was the first suspicion that crossed my mind,
when I had made that discovery. You would
only be angry—and, if you were angry, you
might tear my letter up and read no more
of it.

"Let it be enough, if you please, to say only
this. After thinking it over to the best of my
ability, I made it out that the thing wasn't
likely, for a reason that I will tell you. If you
had been in Miss Rachel's sitting-room, at that
time of night, with Miss Rachel's knowledge
(and it you had been foolish enough to forget
to take care of the wet door) she would have
reminded you—she would never have let you
carry away such a witness against her, as the
witness I was looking at now! At the same
time, I own I was not completely certain in
my own mind that I had proved my own
suspicion to be wrong. You will not have
forgotten that I have owned to hating Miss Rachel.
Try to think, if you can, that there was a little
of that hatred in all this. It ended in my
determining to keep the nightgown, and to
wait, and watch, and see what use I might
make of it. At that time, please to remember,
not the ghost of an idea entered my head that
you had stolen the Diamond."

There, I broke off in the reading of the letter
for the second time.

I had read those portions of the miserable
woman's confession which related to myself,
with unaffected surprise, and, I can honestly
add, with sincere distress. I had regretted,
truly regretted, the aspersion which I had
thoughtlessly cast on her memory, before I
had seen a line of her letter. But when I
had advanced as far as the passage which is
quoted above, I own I felt my mind growing
bitterer and bitterer against Rosanna Spearman
as I went on. "Read the rest for yourself," I
said, handing the letter to Betteredge across
the table. "If there is anything in it that I
must look at, you can tell me as you go on."

"I understand you, Mr. Franklin," he
answered. " It's natural, sir, in you. And, God
help us all!" he added, in a lower tone, "it's
no less natural in her."

I proceed to copy the continuation of the
letter from the original, in my own possession.

"Having determined to keep the nightgown,
and to see what use my love, or my revenge (I
hardly know which) could turn it to in the
future, the next thing to discover was how to
keep it without the risk of being found out.

"There was only one way—to make another
nightgown exactly like it, before Saturday came,
and brought the laundrywoman and her inventory
to the house.

"I was afraid to put it off till the next day
(the Friday); being in doubt lest some accident
might happen in the interval. I determined to
make the new nightgown on that same day
(the Thursday), while I could count, if I
played my cards properly, on having my time
to myself. The first thing to do (after locking
up your nightgown in my drawer) was
to go back to your bedroom not so much to
put it to rights (Penelope would have done
that for me, if I had asked her) as to find out
whether you had smeared off any of the paint-
stain from your nightgown, on the bed, or on
any piece of furniture in the room.

"I examined everything narrowly, and, at
last, I found a few faint streaks of the paint
on the inside of your dressing-gown—not
the linen dressing-gown you usually wore in
that summer season, but a flannel dressing-
gown which you had with you also. I suppose
you felt chilly after walking to and fro in
nothing but your night dress, and put on the
warmest thing you could find. At any rate,
there were the stains, just visible, on the
inside of the dressing-gown. I easily got rid of
these by scraping away the stuff of the flannel.
This done, the only proof left against you was
the proof locked up in my drawer.

"I had just finished your room when I was
sent for to be questioned by Mr. Seegrave,
along with the rest of the servants. Next came
the examination of all our boxes. And then
followed the most extraordinary event of the
day—to me—since I had found the paint on
your nightgown. It came out of the second
questioning of Penelope Betteredge by Superintendent
Seegrave.

"Penelope returned to us quite beside
herself with rage at the manner in which Mr.
Seegrave had treated her. He had hinted,
beyond the possibility of mistaking him, that he
suspected her of being the thief. We were all
equally astonished at hearing this, and we all
asked, Why?

"'Because the Diamond was in Miss Rachel's
sitting-room,' Penelope answered. 'And
because I was the last person in the sitting-room
at night!'

"Almost before the words had left her lips, I
remembered that another person had been in the
sitting-room later than Penelope. That person
was yourself. My head whirled round, and my
thoughts were in dreadful confusion. In the
midst of it all, something in my mind whispered
to me that the smear on your nightgown might
have a meaning entirely different to the meaning
which I had given to it up to that time. 'If the
last person who was in the room is the person
to be suspected,' I thought to myself,
'the thief is not Penelope, but Mr. Franklin
Blake!'

"In the case of any other gentleman, I
believe I should have been ashamed of suspecting
him of theft, almost is soon as the suspicion had
passed through my mind.

"But the bare thought that YOU had let
yourself down to my level, and that I, in
possessing myself of your nightgown, had also
possessed myself of the means of shielding you
from being discovered, and disgraced for life—